Question for Russell Group Uni Essay Exam StudentsWatch

I am looking for students who have or currently study at a Russell Group Uni.

When you did exams which required you to memorise essays for SEEN exams, were you required to memorise the references for the essay and not allowed to take in a reference list?

I have an upcoming exam (biological sciences) (at a non-RG Uni) and our lecturer said he's making us memorise the references as that's how RG unis expect you to do it... He said he's preparing us for going onto PG courses at RG unis and doesn't want this to be a culture shock.

Could any of you confirm whether this is true?

I'm memorising my references, just seems like another unneccessary hurdle alongside having to memorise two separate essays.

We don't have to memorise the references in my course. It might differ from course to course though. That being said I study law, where there's a lot of case references it would be absurd to expect us to memorise all of it.

(Original post by MidgetFever)
We don't have to memorise the references in my course. It might differ from course to course though. That being said I study law, where there's a lot of case references it would be absurd to expect us to memorise all of it.

In our geology essay exams we had to cite remembered references. Didn’t need a list of detailed information at the end but we were expecting to cite Holness (1988) etc in exam essays.

Essay topics weren’t told to us before the exams. It was just expected that we would cite key papers on the module content from memory. That was one of the key differences between a 2:2 and a 2:1 result in the exam essays.